NYT: ‘How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News’

The New York Times and the leftist media are running scared now that they can no longer control the narrative in the main stream media. The 2016 presidential election exposed the main stream media biases as they were forced to pull out all the stops in their attempts to stop Trump and get Clinton her deserving place in the White House. WikiLeaks and Project Veritas confirmed that the mainstream media, including the New York Times, colluded with the Clinton Campaign. Even with this collusion, their chosen candidate lost.

They were initially in shock and beside themselves wondering how this could have happened. How could they have lost control of the information. Then the revelation came — it must have been the “fake news.” News so wrong that it poisoned the American electorate’s minds, otherwise how could they have ever voted for someone like Trump. Although I don’t believe they think this to be the case, it is the narrative they have to create to be able to delegitimize any news organization that does not tow the progressive line.

Well the campaign to stop this “alternative news” has begun — and it’s only going to get worse from here. The New York Times throws the first punch and tipped their hand, they are going after the advertisers on conservative sites and specifically targeting Breitbart first. Rest assured, this is only the beginning.

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

Mr. Phillips had just engaged in a new form of consumer activism, one that is rewriting the rules of online advertising. In the past month and a half, thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on what you might call “hate news” — a toxic mix of lies, white-supremacist content and bullying that can inspire attacks on Muslims, gay people, women, African-Americans and others.

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life.”

He said that he noticed something had gone wrong with internet ads in November when, just out of curiosity, he visited Breitbart News. Like Mr. Phillips, he was gobsmacked by what he found there. His version of Breitbart was plastered with the logos of Silicon Valley brands that courted tech-savvy, pro-diversity millennials. “I couldn’t believe that these progressive companies were paying Breitbart News,” he said.

So he created a Twitter account called Sleeping Giants that would allow him and his fellow activists to anonymously interact with advertisers. Then they sent screenshots to companies like Chase, SoFi and Audi to prove that their ads appeared next to offensive content. Within hours, they received their first response, and they realized that they had stumbled across a potentially powerful tactic.

[…]

Even when ad placements are automated, companies still have the power to control whether neo-Nazis or fake news hucksters profit. In fact, it’s actually rather simple for companies to impose ethical policies, according to Mr. Zeitz. Indeed, his own company (which handles programmatic advertising for other organizations) recently decided to get out ahead of the issue by removing Breitbart News from its advertising marketplace. “We’re not banning them because they’re alt-right or conservative. We banned them from our marketplace because they violate our hate speech policy, which prohibits ad serving on sites that incite violence and discrimination against minority groups.” (Breitbart has said that it condemns racism and bigotry “in any form.”)

[…]

Still, the post-truth reality makes it difficult to measure the scope of the problem. Breitbart’s editor in chief told Bloomberg that despite these bans, his company “continues to experience exceptional growth.” However, public Twitter communications and news accounts prove that advertisers are indeed fleeing the site.

[…]

The founder of Sleeping Giants agreed. “It’s scary to say it, but maybe companies will have to be the standard-bearers for morals right now [emphasis added],” he said. He added that most corporations embrace policies (on paper at least) that prohibit racist bullying and sexual intimidation. Even if President Trump flouts these rules, corporations may continue to uphold them. “We’ve all seen employee handbooks where they have codes of behavior,” he said. “Maybe that’s all we have to fall back on now.”

This approach is nothing new for the Left. Author Pagan Kennedy is advocating creation of activist groups to coordinate and specifically target the advertisers on conservative news outlets like Breitbart. Establish campaigns and bully advertisers into removing their money from any site that does not fit the elitist media narrative.

My personal opinion is that the best way to fight this thinly veiled fascist attempt to silence conservative news outlets it to #ClickConservative. Visit their advertiser. Make it lucrative for companies to put their advertisements on these sites. Money talks and bottom line matters to these companies.